10 Bands Destroyed By "Selling Out"

I’ve got three words for you: ‘Songs of Innocence’. One morning in 2014, we all woke up minding our own business, perfectly oblivious, only to find that during the night Bono and our technological overlords at Apple had decided that, like it or not, we all were getting a free copy of U2’s most recent album.

While the record itself was a bit meh, the revolutionary piece of marketing that unleashed it on the world was universally panned as out of touch and downright invasive, all things considered. Imagine Santa Claus getting drunk one night up in Lapland, deciding he was coming to your house unannounced three months early, and then leaving you a dog turd on your living room carpet instead of a proper present.

That’s kind of what this felt like. As soon as people released that they’d essentially been hacked by The Edge, they began to delete the album in their thousands, many without even giving it a spin.

As for U2, partnering with one of the biggest companies in the world to force feed your latest work to the unsuspecting masses against their will felt borderline dystopian, and set a new benchmark in terms of a legendary band selling out.